r they couldn't
bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyry. The ground falls
away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world?
You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is
delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and
here it lies just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east
side left by her Majesty's corps of Sappers and Miners the other day,
when they and the Engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and
their surveys for the Ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a
place that you won't forget--a place to open a man's soul and make him
prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden
of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind;
and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance
along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway"
("the Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the
highest back of the hills;--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and
told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he
could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who
abide there.

And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on the
Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen,
more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie
whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great
battle, the battle of Ashdown ("AEscendum" in the chroniclers), which
broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes
held the camp and the slope where we are standing--the whole crown of
the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher
ground," as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from
London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's
own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they
did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the lower
ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree,
marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have
seen)." Bless the old chronicler! does he think nobody ever saw the
"single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day,
just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since; an
old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least if